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Those who want to read a book for free generally go to a library, but now they may not have to go much farther than their home computer.

Yahoo announced yesterday that it plans to build a digital library through the Open Content Alliance, which includes the non-profit digital library Internet Archive and libraries at the University of California and the University of Toronto.

Pittsburgh's own Carnegie Mellon University's Million Book Project works with the Internet Archive to supply literary works worldwide to the public for free.

Most of these works are in public domain -- meaning they're not under copyright protection -- and scholarly in nature, said Erika Linke, associate dean of CMU's libraries. Those that are still under copyright are out of print and the authors granted permission, Linke said.

So don't expect to be picking up "The Da Vinci Code" here -- but you can pick up "Ethics of Sex Acts," the project's most downloaded item.

CMU is working with partners in India and China, including the India Institute of Science and China's Ministry of Education, to compile a digital library of one million books by 2007, Linke said. Currently, they have about 500,000 works digitized, she said, and are still in the process of integrating the collections from all the partners.

The goal number isn't the be-all-end-all, but more of a benchmark, something to strive for, Linke said. "Frankly, if we got that far and had a million, we wouldn't stop."

Most downloaded items from the Million Book Project

1. Ethics of Sex Acts, by Rene Guyon (1948)

2. Advanced English Grammar, by George Lyman Kittredge (1913)

3. Brief History of Mathematics, by Wooster Woodruff Beman (1910)

4. Early Jazz, by Gunther Schuller (1968)

5. The Handbook of Soap Manafacture, by W.H. Simmons and H.A. Appleton (1908)

Source: Million Book Project Web site

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